User Interface

December 14, 2011

Specializing in being a generalist

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December 14, 2011

What you don’t know defines you

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December 14, 2011

How to survive a rewrite

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December 14, 2011

Performance is important again

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December 14, 2011

You’re doing Agile all wrong

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November 1, 2011

How this website’s design came about

When I first started working exclusively as a software engineer, people who knew me as a designer were convinced I had gone mad: “Who wouldn’t want to do design?”  Short answer: Me.  I did design for other people for the first 7 years of my career, and let me tell you – it sucked.  It sucked because all of my effort and inspiration would go into a design, only to have it reduced to, “Can you make it blue instead of brown – my wife likes blue.”  That was an actual, real statement for my last design client.  It wasn’t that this was the first time I had received feedback on my designs (and this was by no stretch of imagination the worst feedback I have every gotten), but it was the last straw.  It would be years before I opened Photoshop and Illustrator again.

November 8, 2011

Why I finally decided to start a blog

Back in 1998, I made my first real, publicly accessible website.  It was NeilsMachine.com (long since taken down), and it was a “blog” before blogs were blogs.  I talked about nothing at all, because I really had nothing to say.  Shortly after my NeilsMachine days, I got caught up in my professional career and let all my personal sites languish and die.  When I did my own consultancy, I never managed to get a website up, which always bothered me.  The challenge, I found, is that when would I have time to do my own website when I was building sites for others?  I made several good stabs at it – including one design that to this day is still very cool – but they never saw the light of day.

"I’ve found myself with more ideas than time. Rather than obsess over one article at a time, I’m going to take the advice of a friend and throw out article ideas to see what sticks."